Building a windows 10 instrument machine from MDT

Building a new instrument virtual machine from MDT

Note: this page documents the process of building a windows 10 system. This page does not focus on deploying IBEX itself, and if you are converting an instrument from SECI to IBEX you will generally not need to perform this process as a suitable NDX machine will already exist.

Find a suitable physical host

• Find a suitable physical host server. The server will need a minimum of 14GB of memory and 256GB of hard disk space free
  • If you are building a real instrument machine, this will usually be NDHINST, and the virtual machine that you're building will usually be NDXINST

Copy VHDs onto physical host

• Copy the set of IBEX VHDs you wish to install from the share onto the NDH host computer.

Configure the VM

• Go into hyper-v manager on the MDT server host and select new machine. Default settings are mostly ok other than:
  • Set the name to the intended hostname of the NDXMDTSERVPROD machine
  • Make sure VM files are stored on a disk with adequate space (often D:\ or E:\ on NDH machines)
  • Set startup memory to 14GB.
  • Set it to connect to ISIS network if you get the option, otherwise it will be ok on the default.
  • Set virtual hard disk size to 128GB
  • Install OS later
• Find the latest windows 10 ISO file from \\isis\inst$\mdt$\dev1\MDTDeploymentShare\Boot\LiteTouchPE_x64_Hyper-V.iso and copy this ISO onto the NDH machine
  • Note: This ISO is not really a windows PE iso, it is instead an ISO which has been built by MDT. You cannot just use a version downloaded from microsoft.com
• Add the VHDs that you copied over earlier as "SCSI" disks in hyper-v manager
  • Note you do not need to map them anywhere at this stage, they merely need to be attached to the VM
• Tell Hyper-V to boot from this ISO
• Boot the machine
• Select "Build thick updated windows 10 image"
• Computer name - set it to NDXINST (same as name in Hyper-V)
• Join the default ISIS workgroup (found on passwords page if you are unsure)
• Don't restore settings or data
• When asked for admin password, refer to passwords page and add the new password there if necessary.